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NPS Form i0400•a OW Aqd"W. 1024-WIS <br /> Wft) <br /> United States Department of the Interior <br /> National Park Service <br /> National Register of Historic Places <br /> Continuation Sheet <br /> Section number 8 Page 2 <br /> the Colorado counties of Denver, Jefferson, Clear Creek, and Gilpin. The <br /> magnet for the rapid influx of population was the phenomenal value of gold <br /> extraction in Gilpin County from 1859 to 1893, when it led Colorado and most <br /> of the West in gold output, valued at approximately $61 million. Total gold <br /> output during the period of historic significance, from 1859-1918, was <br /> $83,364,157. Mineral production as a whole during the same period was <br /> $86,773,688. Not until 1893 was Gilpin County surpassed in gold production <br /> by Teller County in southern Colorado.' The themes of demographic <br /> expansion, rapid urbanization, and economic development of the Rocky <br /> Mountain and Intermountain West thus are the framework for consideration of <br /> the Central City-Black Hawk NHL District under Criterion 1. <br /> Second, the district is eligible as nationally significant under Criterion <br /> 4. The hundreds of buildings, structures, and sites that remain from the <br /> historic period embody the distinctive characteristics of building practices <br /> and urban development of the 19th-century "boomtown" or "bonanza" mining era <br /> in mountainous areas of the Western frontier. They are unique as rare <br /> surviving examples of commercial, social, government, and domestic types of <br /> frontier mining town architecture which retain an exceptional degree of <br /> their historical association and architectural integrity. Collectively, <br /> they also are a sole surviving example of the organic development of large <br /> prosperous mining districts in which mining, ore processing, and their <br /> supportive commercial and social institutions were functionally <br /> interrelated. The Colorado Business Directory of the period described the <br /> urban corridor they formed in accordance with the topography of the area as <br /> a "continuous settlement over three miles in length with arms reaching up <br /> the tributary gulches. " The "surrounding hills" were "literally honeycombed <br /> with mines. i' <br /> II. CRITERION 1: Significance for Association with Events in the <br /> Settlement and Socioeconomic Development of the Rocky Mountain West <br /> Historian Ray Allen Billington describes the distinctive settlement process <br /> that occurred on the mining frontier that diverged markedly from traditional <br /> agricultural settlement: <br /> Instead of seeking fertile, well-watered fields, miners were <br /> attracted to mountain and desert lands that might normally have <br /> waited generations for occupants. And instead of advancing from <br /> east to west, the mining frontier moved from west to east in a <br /> series of thrusts that left islands of wilderness between the new <br />